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>> Monday, October 23, 2006

Please, don't get your hopes up already. It's not we have found anything spectacular. I would cry if we did, really. You know Discworld? It rocks, especially because Philips announced a CD-i version back in 1995. Since that day I was drooling over the copyrights Psygnosis already managed to get in the official CD-i catalogue. After Philips redesigned the official CD-i catalogue early 1995, the title forecast was already pretty exciting because of two copyrights: Creature Shock and Discworld. I never understood why these games weren't available. Without the Internet as a prominent information source I could only imagine some regional differences. In the end, only Creature Shock was released in 1997 (three years of waiting!) but nobody was talking about Discworld anymore. I asked anyone I knew about it: The CD-i Gold Club didn't know anything. The Philips Hotline didn't know anything. CD-i Magazine didn't know anything. That was pretty much it. Still, the whole Discworld topic may be something which kept me interested in the CD-i thing. Whatever happened there... Since that first time it took me years before I found out about the Black Moon Project. Even more, I never read any UK CD-i magazine issue simply because it wasn't available in the Netherlands. I was highly surprised to find out the UK CD-i magazine actually REVIEWED the CD-i version of Discworld. Yet, I was 100% convinced the CD-i version was about complete and ready, mainly because it was showcased in the Mega Pop Classics 1995 disc. Mind you, the cover on the top left is genuine, I didn't need to photoshop anything, that is the real cover.

But wait, by reviewing Discworld on CD-i, the UK CD-i magazine also started the biggest blunder in CD-i's history. In the footnote the deal was obvious but oh-so disappointing: "At the time of going to press, the CD-i version of Discworld was in the final (beta-testing) stages of development. We, therefore, had to use the PC version of the game for this review. According to our sources, though, both versions play identically, the only differences occuring in the speed of the game as a whole, and a few cut-backs in background animations on the CD-i version. If there's anything else we'll let you know."

Come on! What were they thinking? Even todays magazines would never get away with something like this! I couldn't believe they actually reviewed the PC version. Dear Mark Ramshaw, if you ever read this, please sign up and explain yourself. You have no idea what load of stir this caused in the world of CD-i, even 10 years after your review.

Yes, it's been ten years after the initial release. But there is no. Even no beta version. The Black Moon project has been able to retrieve more beta releases of games like Battle Chess, Voyeur II, Microcosm... But apparently Discworld is a different story. It's not that we didn't try. Far from that. The most easiest start to trace anything was ofcourse by contacting the formal developer: Teeny Weeny Games.

Apart from a vague statement from the original writer, this was a dead end. Still: "As far as I know, yes the game was completed, but Philips never published it." - That's quite a thought! It was certainly worth digging more and more... In the end the title was (going to be?) developed by TWG/PE (Perfect Entertainment) Sheffield and the closest contact with Philips should be Philips Interactive Media in Redhill, UK. Great, because the Philips Media business was shut down years ago.

Different people all have different things to say. Ofcourse we love the positive reactions like the game was actually finished. Claims about compression issues of the graphics and animation cut-downs are totally believable, but ofcourse on the contrary it was said Discworld was only in alpha-stage and non-existent. Still, I found it very interesting whether Teeny Weeny Games was actually contractually obliged in completing the game. That would mean some gold disc state should exist. Perhaps with the people of the old Philips testing facilities, perhaps with the original coders.

All of the contacts were very promising, but in the end the results are mediocre. Nobody was able to show anything of CD-i Discworld and all their memories were vague. Conclusion? We don't know if we'll ever find anything more of it but let me ask you gently, if you know anything about the CD-i version of Discworld, leave me a message. I'm highly interested.

On the left you see the thumbnails of the CD-i review pages which were published in UK CD-i magazine issue 18. Click on each to enlarge and enjoy the content.

>> Saturday, October 21, 2006

It will be no surprise to you I was a fancy reader of the dutch CD-i magazine. Already in love with the system, I also checked out every other magazine in town that was writing about CD-i as well. And joy, we had two other magazines in the Netherlands: Power Unlimited and Hoog Spel. Especially the first one I didn't like at all, because it's written towards a very young public. Those with a little more 'serious' (catch the drift) interest in videogames went to buy Hoog Spel. Both magazines were spending a little attention to CD-i when a high-profile game was released. Mainly the FMV games like Dragon's Lair and Mad Dog McCree were reviewed and they actually got a pretty decent score. But still, even in the ninetees CD-i was drawed in being bad, slow and unsupported. Oh well, it didn't matter to me.

Recently I got in contact with one of the editors of HoogSpel, the dutch games magazine who spent a little attention to CD-i just as CD-i magazine itself. The magazine ended life in 2000 due to several internal problems with advertisers. Apparently, they were forced to review games which were going to be advertised, otherwise the money-shooter didn't want to do any business. Because the main interest was not CD-i, but Sony's Playstation and the Super Nintendo, there was just no room for consoles like 3DO and CD-i. Philips only advertised in CD-i magazine, and never intended to spend money elsewhere. I feel they should have, because the main videogames magazines are a perfect start for anyone to learn more about a different console. Probably it had something to do with the multimedia status of the CD-i rather than being a core games console. Compared to the rest HoogSpel was the best general games magazine covering CD-i.

>> Sunday, October 15, 2006

Peculiar isn't it. Last week, Europe was treated with the release of an Internet Kit for the beloved Nintendo DS system. In an article I was noted on the fact the Nintendo DS wasn't able to perform broadband action on such a small machine, it was low specced, and it looked more like the 14K4 modem and the Internet Kit that was issued with the Philips CD-i system! Yesterday I went to the shop and asked for a demonstration. How surprised I was, this played exactly like the good old CD-i internet times. Somehow I felt an enormous nostalgic urge to buy this piece of hardware. You even need an extra piece of memory (The Memory Expansion Pak), just like the CD-i needed the Digital Video Cartridge to be able to go on-line. It's a pity The Black Moon Project didn't exist at the time I was playing online on my CD-i, now it's hard to compare these services. With CD-Online shut down, I've found my next best piece of hardware to play with.

Just a moment later I paid some attention to the software library the Nintendo DS holds. I was expecting lots of Nintendo games like Super Mario, and Oh Yeah, there were a lot. More to my surprise were the latest fashion style series: Brain Training, English Training, The Cooking Manual, Internet Browser, and more edutainment (Lovely CD-i word again)... Do I need to say more?

>> Monday, October 9, 2006

My favourite Philips Games Studio was definately Funhouse. I was highly impressed with the animation techniques they filled their CD-i games with. With only three games put to the market, Philips Funhouse was led by Cliff Johnson and inspired by puzzles, puzzles and more puzzles. We paid a visit to one of the "FunHeads": Gordon Brooks. Enjoy his extensive look on the history of Philips Funhouse and find the hints of the hidden games!

"I started out with the Kidspace group when my friend Rusty Mills, the first animator at Kidspace, asked me to come in because he knew that I had a background in both music and animation, and they needed someone to translate the musical beat timings for the songs in Cartoon Jukebox onto exposure sheets, the frame-by-frame time maps that animators use to keep everything synchronized to the sound track.

But it was my computer background that landed me a permanent job at Philips (then American Interactive Media). We were using a tool for compositing animation onto backgrounds that was not yet on the market--Autodesk Animator. Steve Segal, the animation director, and Rusty had been sent to classes to learn how to use Animator, but they were still unable to get it to do one of the most important functions they needed. You see, the coloring function of Cartoon Jukebox required that certain color masses on the screen be assigned to certain positions in the color look-up table (CLUT). But every time Steve would composite animation with a background, the CLUT would get squeezed to its smallest possible size, and colors would get mapped to the wrong place.

I stayed up very late one night with the animation files, a copy of Animator, and the draft manual that Autodesk had sent. By morning I had solved the problem, and I was immediately hired to manage the post-production. That was what it was like in the early days. Nobody really knew how this was going to work, so anyone who could show an ability to solve problems and learn new things was given the chance to do so, and we got a lot of amazing things accomplished that way. I eventually became Post-Production Supervisor, which involved not only preparing the actual files for delivery to the engineers, but also organizing the work that the artists did so that we could easily find things when they were needed, and being the go-between between the creative staff and the engineers (being the only one there with a strong background from both sides). This often came down to the directors asking for something that the engineers would swear was impossible, followed by a long discussion between me and the engineers, followed by the engineers finding a way to make it work anyway.

Even when I started taking on other tasks, I continued being involved in Post on all of my titles through Hanna-Barbera's Cartoon Carnival. But more about that later.
As I recall, the Kidspace titles were Cartoon Jukebox, Sandy's Circus Adventure, the two Richard Scarry discs, and the two Mother Goose discs. Kidspace was transformed into Sidewalk Studios after Frank Huttinger left as executive producer, to be replaced by Rebecca Newman, with Gary Drucker continuing as Creative Director, and pretty much all of the rest of the crew intact, although both Rusty and Steve Segal had by that time moved on to other projects. The Sidewalk titles included The Berenstain Bears On Their Own, the two Aesop discs, Miniature Golf, Surf City, and Crayon Factory. As time went on I had less and less to do with the Sidewalk titles, as I was developing Merlin's Apprentice, at first for Sidewalk. I started training a new Post-Production Supervisor for Berenstain Bears. My work for Aesop and Mini-Golf was mainly advisory, and by the time Surf City rolled around I was in the process of moving over to the Funhouse group and volunteered to edit the music because the animation for many of the songs was going way over budget and regular editor didn't have to musical background to cut the songs down without changing the beat or making obvious noises at the cuts. I had no involvement whatsoever in Crayon Factory.

As I said, Merlin's Apprentice was originally going to be a Sidewalk production, and it was an original idea of mine. It was based on the old text adventure games where you go around to different places, solve puzzles, gather objects, and eventually solve the game as a whole. (As you can see by the finished project, the idea was thoroughly transformed into something else by the time Cliff Johnson and I got
through with it.) But Sarina Simon decided that Merlin didn't fit in with the Sidwalk titles. At that time, Cliff Johnson was working on Hanna-Barbera's Cartoon Carnival, pretty much on his own. Cliff was the award-winning author of a few wonderful puzzle games for the Macintosh: The Fool's Errand, At the Carnival, and 3 in Three.

So Merlin and I moved over to Funhouse, where it was transformed into a classic Cliff Johnson puzzler (what Cliff liked to refer to as "Challenging Tales of Adventure"). I was co-writer and animation director for Merlin, and I brought in some of my contacts from the animation industry who were between pictures (and background artist Doran Fish from Sidewalk, who had done many of the concept sketches for my version of Merlin) to give Merlin it's rich look and surprisingly fluid animation (which can be attributed especially to character designer/animator Susan Zytka and animator Brad Forbush). Another thing that made Merlin so rich was the use of two-plane animation, which had been used at Sidewalk, but never to full advantage. At Funhouse we squeezed every byte of bandwidth out the the realtime stream to deliver the most detailed backgrounds we could fit in.

Now, while I was working on the story and animation for Merlin, we were still working on Cartoon Carnival, and naturally Cliff needed someone to do Post, and I just happened to have some experience in that area, so I did Post on that title at the same time, and also edited all of the sound effects (Cliff was going to hire the effects editor from Sandy's Circus Adventure, but I didn't like her work--and neither did she, preferring mix engineering to editing--and talked him into letting me give it a go. I was very busy). Eventually I hired an assistant for Cartoon Carnival, and she moved up to Post-Production Supervisor so I could concentrate on directing the animation and editing the sound track for Merlin as well.

Production schedules overlapped greatly at Funhouse, so we would be finishing Cartoon Carnival, producing Merlin, and doing pre-production writing, art, and game design for Labyrinth of Crete. We were also developing a lot of game ideas that never happened. Among the ones I remember were a CDi adaptation of Stephen Sondheim's "Into the Woods" (Cliff is a personal friend of Sondheim, who is a devoted puzzle fan),
and a CDi version of 3 in Three. Also on the drawing board at Funhouse was a title called Treasures of Oz. Oz was supposed to another one of Cliff's "Challenging Tales
of Adventure," but things started to get a bit complicated at Funhouse.

It was pretty crazy. I was developing games and a story for Oz, while still fulfilling my commitment to finish the sound track for Merlin. There were three of us to start with: me, art director Teri Farrell-Gittens, and engineer Susan Rosenberg. Eventually Merlin got finished, production of Oz got underway, and we came very, very close to finishing the title (within two months, I would guess) before we all got laid off and the projects that hadn't been released were cancelled."

Thanks to Gordon, we will continue with the story later with an extensive look at one of Funhouse's unreleased project: Treasures of Oz. There's even another story behind the eventual production group: Philips Kaleidoscope, which is also fascinating to hear. Keep in touch and visit the forum for any questions you might have.

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Welcome to the wonderful world of Interactive Dreams. You've just come to a warmhearted place all dedicated to the Philips CD-i. With attention to detail and quality, 2015 should see the rise of CD-i as a Retrogaming platform. For many CD-i has gone as a relative obscurity had it not been for the intervention of websites like The Black Moon Project and Interactive Dreams. Hopefully we're doing our bit to set the record straight along with all the other great CD-i projects.

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